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This is how the Yosemite Valley looked in the 1860s. If the view looks familiar, you can credit the photographer: Working with an enormous box camera and a portable darkroom hauled by a pack of mules, Carleton Watkins took the pictures that persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, permanently setting Yosemite aside "for public use, resort, and recreation." In other words, Watkins' photographs literally preserved the landscapes they represented.

Currently on view at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, these pictures retain their power a century and a half after they were taken. Watkins conveys the scale of Yosemite – and the sense of being in the valley – more effectively than any photographer before or since. This is partially due to the scale of his plates, a visually overwhelming eighteen by twenty-two inches. His focus is another important factor, accentuating the foreground to suggest unlimited terrain just out of sight.

This transportive quality was essential to the political impact of Watkins' photographs, since neither Lincoln nor most of Congress had ever seen Yosemite in person when the Grant Act was proposed. Yet his images could as easily have been the ruin of Yosemite: Watkins was supported in his documentation of the valley by some of the first people who sought to develop it. Constructing hotels, they perceived his pictures as the perfect advertisements for their burgeoning business.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Watkins' pictures brought Yosemite out of the wilderness into public awareness. Today they bear witness to the nation's wise response.